The elder Welles: A waste of talent?

Barbara Shulgasser, EXAMINER MOVIE CRITIC

Published 4:00 am, Friday, February 2, 1996

ORSON WELLES was the original Monty Python, the first Tracey Ullman, a playful master of silly humor and an enthusiastic and gifted impersonator, as seen in a new documentary, "Orson Welles: The One-Man Band."

Cobbled from bits and scraps of film finally released 10 years after his death by the companion of Welles' last years, Oja Kodar, the film will enlighten and depress Welles fans. With Kodar's assistance, director Vassili Silovic assembles a picture of the elder Welles, returned in 1975 from self-exile in Europe to an American Film Institute Lifetime Achievement Award ironically given by the same Hollywood establishment that supposedly venerated his work but had refused to finance his movies for the previous 20 years.

The man who had made "Citizen Kane," "The Magnificent Ambersons," "Touch of Evil," "The Chimes at Midnight," "Mr. Arkadin" and "The Lady from Shanghai" was now living in Los Angeles and making ends meet by doing voice overs and small acting roles.

Narrated in German with English subtitles, here are clips from his unfinished films: "Don Quixote," "The Deep" and "The Merchant of Venice." Sometimes actors died, sometimes Welles ran out of money, sometimes negatives were stolen, sometimes, as in the case of "The Other Side of the Wind," it was "unforeseen legal entanglements" that hindered the release of a nearly finished picture.

But this is where "The One-Man Band" itself looks a little shaky. Exactly what sort of "legal entanglements" ? Under what circumstances were the negatives stolen? From Welles' hotel room? Or by someone who wasn't paid for his services?

What this film inadvertently shows us is that Welles was at heart a talented dilettante. When Kodar pulls out charming little doodles Welles had painted that he had meant to throw away but she had kept, you see the parallel to film clips Welles made of himself in close-up reading from "Moby Dick," or made up to look in silhouette like Winston Churchill. He enjoyed toying with ideas, pointing the camera at himself and letting it rip.

To that end, Welles traveled with a movie camera and editing table for 30 years, ostensibly to further work on his projects-in-progress funded by his acting work around the world. But you get a sense that it was the joy of doing the work that motivated him far more than the need to finish anything.

He seemed to have had a wonderful time making little home movies - "Stately Homes" and "Swinging London" - in which he played all the parts, including the women, with Monty Pythonesque irreverence. But these bits of fluff really aren't finished either. In "Tailors," Welles plays himself, that is, a large American tourist, being served by two imperious English haberdashers. On the one hand, only a wealthy and privileged fellow could afford such a luxury. But Welles turns the fitting into an occasion to mock himself as a man whose unusual size is a source of unending amusement to his smirking measurers. It is an extremely odd and uncomfortably revealing confirmation of Welles' reportedly low self-esteem.

"One-Man Band" provides an interesting contrast to the recently aired PBS documentary, "The Battle Over Citizen Kane," in which wunderkind Welles, a famous stage director, radio actor and movie star by his mid-20s, sows the seeds of his own destruction by misjudging the vehemence of his enemies (William Randolph Hearst, being one of the more powerful ones).

Silovic concentrates on the older Welles, and in clips of him addressing students at film conferences, he is still dashing, bright-eyed, witty and charming, yet there is a sense of loss. Around him looms a distressing aura of self-sabotage. One unfinished film would be annoying. Two exasperating. Three the makings of artistic tragedy. But as the numbers get higher, a pattern emerges.

It couldn't all have been bad luck. Could a little of it have been due to Welles' bad planning? Or unrealistic goals? Or an inability to function in the real world as a grown-up, rather than just a wunderkind with his future ahead?

While Kodar and Silovic's stated desire was to put to rest the idea that Welles did no valuable work in the last 20 years of his life, by the end of the film, we come away with opposite feeling. What a sad, unfulfilled conclusion to Welles' promising life.

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